9630

John
CAGE

John Cage
- a statement.

John Cage never died. Moreover,
as a composer he couldn't even have died, for the very reason that he never
really was a composer. Or, he may very well have been the first composer to
become famous for never really writing music. In the spirit of Zen, he refused
to get involved in the pursuit of musical truth and by doing so, found himself
in the midst of its very essence.

Spread over the last twenty-five
years and over the most diverse places on the planet, I had quite a few occassions
to chat with John. Maybe the most important thought we shared -apart from our
preference for vegetarian food- was that music wasn't about likes and dislikes.
Also his decline of ego-expression, and in this respect his rejection of romanticism,
was most fundamental for the development of twentieth century serious music.
Cage never condemned (except maybe when sound at some occasions became a lethal
weapon against the people as in the case of G. Branca) but his position in the
mostly European new-music polemic, gave rise to the most vehement debates.

His (however relative) success
in Europe is symptomatic for the ambiguity of our music culture. The dominant
music culture here being the continuation of (German?) romanticism (Stockhausen,
Boulez, Ferneyhough...), within an intellectual framework wherein this continuity
is repulsed for it is loaded with guilt. In such a state of mental schizophrenia,
Cage was welcomed as a much needed proof. Only in this way, can I explain the
acceptance -hiding an even stronger repulsion- of John Cage in Europe.

Godfried-Willem RAES

Musicmaker

(gepubliceerd
in MusikTexte, n.a.v. het overlijden van John Cage)

Footnotes:

1. John Cage died august 12th of
1992. He was born in Los Angeles 1912. He studied composition with Henry Cowell
and Arnold Schoenberg (1934-37). After that, he moved to New York where he met
the dancer Merce Cunningham. Their first collaborative projects date from 1942.

2. His early work (the early percussion
music and the music for prepared piano) set aside, Cage never attempted to let
his personallity and its preferences dictate the shape his music would take.
The idea of chance music, his most basic compositional method, is really the
abdication of compositional thought in the West-European traditional sense.
Schoenberg was quite right in what he said to and about Cage. Schoenberg however,
was a late romantic.

3. The idea 'let a sound be a sound'
could also have been expressed by a Zen master.

4. Cage was not as consistent as
many theorists of new music musicology would like us to believe. The fact that
all of his scores are 'copyrighted', is a complete absurdity. Also Cage, although
I wouldn't readily say so, hated pop- and rockmusic.

5. On one of the New Music America
Festivals, Cage was very upset with a performance by one of the New York 'new
music artists', Glen Branca, who made it into a point, to play sort of either
what at the highest technically possible sound level.

6. The ongoing contradiction with
the reception of John Cages music in Europe seems to be that everybody attaches
quite some importance to his work, but barely anybody really likes his music
or actually even wants to listen to it.

The problem here is that no intellectual
will dare to say that he doesn't like Cages music, for they all know that Cage
said himself that music isn't about likes and dislikes. Yet the consequence,
that the well or not being interesting of Cage music, depends almost exclusively
on the attitude of the listener, is not experienced as very motivating. It should
be clear that this attitude is in no way unlogical, since if the interest of
any percept is fully depending on the perceiver -as is the case in pure chance
music- then anything can be listened to as music. Thus Cages chance production
becomes fully unnecessary.

7. After the second world war,
new music life was all of the sudden given a lot of support in Germany. This
was part of the German 'Wiedergutmachung' and meant to help Germany getting
rid of its bad reputation due to its former politics with regard to 'entartete
Kunst'. The acceptance of Cage in Darmstadt for instance was only based on the
high need to prove the tollerance of modern Germany.

8. Cages being gay contributed
to his acceptance in modern Germany.

9. We have to be carefull not to
contribute more than needed to the ongoing process of deification of John Cage.
First of all, he was not at all the 'inventor' of chance music. There have been
numerous people in music history using chance methods as compositional tools.
It is also untrue to attribute the invention of chance music to Marcel Duchamps,
as Cage himself did.

The other 'invention' one frequently
finds attributed to Cage, is the use of the prepared piano. Yet again, there
have been quite a number of instances in music history where pianos where 'prepared'
to get different sound results.

Furthermore, noise-music cannot
be attributed to Cage neither, since this clearly came from the Italian and
Russian futurists long before Cages birth. Also, quite some innovation seems
to stem from American composers such as Henry Cowell (cluster-music), George
Antheill (machinesounds) and Edgar Varese (percussion music).

I then made use of my Cartridge
Music to write a text. Cartridge Music is a number of materials with
directions for their use. There are twenty ordinary non-transparent sheets having
biomorphic shapes. There are several transparent plastic sheets, one having
points, a second having small circles, a third having a meandering dotted line,
a fourth representing the face of a chronometer. By superimposing all the transparent
sheets on that ordinary one which had the same number of of biomorphic shapes
that Kepes had given me subjects, and by adjusting the meandering line so that
it intersected at least one point within one of the shapes and made at least
one entrance and exit with respect to the chronometer, I was able to make a
detailed plan for writing. Points within shapes were ideas relevant to a particular
subject, points outside were irrelevant ideas. The circles were stories, likewise
relevant and irrelevant. The numbers on the chronometer were interpreted, not
as seconds, but as lines in stenographic notebooks. I arrived, that is, at directives
like the following: from line 24 to line 57, tell a story that is relevant to
proportion, discuss an idea about rhythm, follow this with an idea that has
nothing to do with balance. Obtaining many such directives, I then did the writing.
Empty spaces follow from the method I've described.